What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first
sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is
something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into
the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate
and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not
too much "I" in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater
had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself
stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those
blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet
delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better
than he would have thought he could do.
What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be jerks and bumps were
magically smoothed out in the finished product. At one point where the
copy-reader's blue pencil had elided an adjective which the writer had
deemed specially telling, he felt a sharp pang of disappointed
resentment. Without that characterization the sentence seemed lifeless.
Again, in another passage he wished that he had edited himself with more
heed to the just word. Why had he designated the train as "rumbling"
along the cut? Trains do not rumble between rock walls, he remembered;
they move with a sustained and composite roar.
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